Writing Roundup I

The greatest of all cliches in Foodbloglandia is the entry that opens with an apology for not publishing a blog post in a long time. I won’t do that. I will say that one reason I don’t post as often on Food With Legs as I once did is that I’ve been lucky enough to find several other publications to publish my stuff (and pay me for it). Oh, and I wrote a cookbook and have been busy promoting it over the last few months.

There is a certain appeal to having one place where anyone who wants to find it can get to my writing. That’s why I started this blog in the first place. With that in mind, here is the first weekly (maybe) collection of summaries and links to what I’ve written this week.

There is a fairly consistent stream of jibber jabber about whether or not Toronto is a “mature food city”. (You know, like New York, Montreal or the other self-conscious, better-than-us points of reference.) Obviously, I’m a bit cynical about the validity or point of the question, but when I feel like discussing it, I’ll usually say that I think the food shops, bodegas, cheese-mongers, and butcher shops deserve as much (or more) consideration as a city’s restaurants. All that’s to say that I was happy to cover the opening of a full-service butcher shop, Roast Fine Foods, in my neighbourhood — even if it is just a few doors down from Macelleria Atlas, my current favourite.

My craft beer column on PostCity.com is now 79 installments old and I’m still finding new and interesting beers to write about. In fairness, that’s partly because the LCBO is doing an increasingly good job of seeking out international stars and accepting the new, boundary-pushing releases from local breweries. Tribute is a (more-or-less) English-style barley wine from a New Zealand brewery. Definitely on the pricey side, but I’ll bet dollars-to-doughnuts that this is the last time we see it in the LCBO for a decade.

I know how much blog readers love the “how-to” genre. Hell, it’s one of the biggest part of my own blog reading. In some cases, I think it’s just as important to put together a few quick links to other posts that have already figured out the best techniques rather than re-inventing the wheel. In this case, I have five kitchen equipment maintenance tasks that I like to get down sometime between Christmas and the 15th of January.